The Timeline Diverged Somewhere Around 1971
I keep thinking about 1971. It was seven years before I was even born, but I can't shake the feeling that it's the exact spot where the train came off the tracks. I'm sitting here by the window right now, watching the tide come in against the palm trees, thousands of miles away from the cold grey estates of my youth. It's a subtropical paradise on paper, but you can't actually run away from the atmosphere of the modern world. It follows you everywhere. Even here, in the heat, the locals and the expats are all glued to their phones, chased by the same invisible anxiety that ruins Britain. The world feels completely distorted, and I think it all traces back to that one specific moment.
I keep trying to make sense of how we got here. It seems to me it all goes back to that decision in 1971 when the Americans broke the gold standard and stopped backing the dollar with anything tangible. Before that, money meant something solid. A pound or a dollar was tied to a physical asset, a finite amount of gold sitting in a secure vault. It meant money had a natural limit. Governments couldn't just invent it out of thin air to fund endless corporate expansion, globalised supply chains, and massive surveillance networks. There was a tether to reality. There was a baseline truth to what things cost and what a day of honest work was actually worth.
When they cut that tether, the world split. It allowed the financial system to become completely detached from physical human effort. Suddenly, central banks could create endless credit out of nothing, which completely blew up the cost of everything real, like land and housing, while turning everyday life into a speculative game for billionaires. That's why the economic maths of modern life is so totally broken for normal people. I keep thinking about how a normal young couple today will work 80 hours a week between them, two full-time 40-hour jobs, and they still can't afford a basic place to live. In the old world, one honest wage from a factory or a yard could buy a home and support a family. Now, the system requires double the human labour just to tread water because the currency has been diluted into oblivion by digital printing presses.
It wasn't just an economic shift though. I suspect it did something permanent and nasty to our minds. When money stopped being real, human value stopped being real. Everything became about efficiency, metrics, and endless growth on a spreadsheet. It opened the door for this hyper-globalised, hyper-connected digital mess we are stuck in now. Because capital could move anywhere instantly, communities were hollowed out. Factories closed, local shops vanished, and giant corporate monopolies took over the earth. We traded stable, grounded lives for a world of cheap plastic imports, total digital dependence, and constant tracking.
I wonder if anyone else feels the psychological exhaustion of it all. We are bombarded with a non-stop stream of synthetic information, tracked by algorithms, and managed by a system that views us as data points rather than people. It feels like we are living in a simulation that started the moment the wealth of nations became an illusion. The media manipulates every single headline to keep people paranoid, angry, scared and distracted from the fact that their quality of life has completely collapsed compared to what their grandparents had. Or even their parents had.
Perhaps I'm talking out of my arse? Still though, looking out at the ocean right now, I know I made the right choice to quietly step away from mainstream society. I couldn't bear the fake noise of the UK anymore, the absolute misery of the working class being squeezed dry while being told everything is wonderful because property prices have risen over the past three decades. The whole global setup feels like a house of cards built on the empty promises of 1971, and everybody is just quietly waiting for the wind to blow it all down. I've got my corner of the beach, away from the madness, and I think I'll just stay right here. I'm a lone wolf and I know what I need to do to survive.